banking

What is the account penetration among women in South Asia? Has the spread of bank agents affected how adults do their banking in Bangladesh and Nepal? How are people all over South Asia saving, borrowing, making payments and managing risk?

In the past, the view of financial inclusion in SAR has been incomplete, and the details unsatisfying. A patchwork of data from diverse and often incompatible household and central bank surveys was the only information available with which to construct a regional picture.

With the release of the Global Financial Inclusion Indicators (Global Findex) we now have a comprehensive, individual-level, and publicly-available database that allows for comparisons across 148 economies of how adults around the world manage their daily finances and plan for the future. The Global Findex database also identifies barriers to financial inclusion, such as cost, travel time, distance, amount of paper work, and income inequality.

This post is the second in a special blog series on the Microfinance Institution, SKS and it's IPO launch in partnership with CGAP. Over the coming weeks we’ll be featuring a variety of voices on the issues raised by the IPO. We welcome your participation in this discussion through comments.

This is the first time that I have knowingly contributed to a ‘blog’; hence I am not familiar with medium’s etiquette. Am I to oppose, to concur, or to add? I’ll try to do all three.

Steve Rasmussenposes a number of important questions; they are mostly about the future, and about clients, which is surely where our focus should be.

I shall not comment on the rights or wrongs, legal or ethical, of the ways in which the shareholdings of the SKS clients’ Mutual Benefit Trusts were handled; Professor Sriram has already covered that issue, very well.